Network management has always been a big challenge in large-scale enterprise and datacenter environments. The network must operate reliably and provide high-performance connectivity while ensuring organizational policy management. This problem is further compounded by provisioning high-level guarantees such as network isolation across complex network boundaries and decoupling logical and physical network using network virtualization schemes.
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a potential solution, providing great flexibility for fine-grained data plane control. Most existing work has provided network management solutions for a full deployment of SDN switches or a pure legacy switch deployment. However, monetary or practical constraints have made “hybrid networks” a reality. The term “hybrid networks” refers to systems, which are partially deployed using SDN switches and partially using legacy switches.
Most existing solutions do not provide a management mechanism that can handle network management of hybrid systems. While hybrid topologies have been suggested, no adequate management solution exists. Additionally, while pure legacy network management and pure SDN management are well-studied fields, existing SDN controllers and legacy switch management mechanisms cannot be directly applied to hybrid network systems, as they will be unable to manage the legacy part of the system.